


So I Bury It And Forget

by Mighty_Meerkat



Series: Knight's Crossing [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: But I'm gonna be honest it kind of goes off the walls from there, Depressingly Straight and White, Do you like sad literature about the early 20th century but wish it had a happier ending?, F/M, IS THERE A THEME GOING ON HERE WITH WHAT I WRITE?, Implied Sexual Content, Inspired sort of by the musical stylings of Kate Bush, Magical Realism, Miscarriage, Murder, Original Character Death(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-World War I, Secret Relationship, Then this fic might be for you!!!, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 04:26:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11913186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mighty_Meerkat/pseuds/Mighty_Meerkat
Summary: There are plenty of stories about Meredith Mansfield, the society darling who became a forest spirit for a hundred years. They say she sacrificed her child to the forest to be raised as its own protector. They say her one true love was a soldier, who no matter how he tried could not wash the blood from his hands enough. They say she betrayed him to a cruel man, who lived for the hunt, if it had no means of fighting back against him. She betrayed this hunter too, luring him into the forest and striking him down with lightning on the night of their engagement. She trapped her old lover inside a tree, and for her crimes, she was herself trapped in the river for a hundred years, until all who remembered her were dead and gone.This is all true, for a certain degree of the word ‘true’.But it does not tell the whole story.





	So I Bury It And Forget

There are plenty of stories about Meredith Mansfield, the society darling who became a forest spirit for a hundred years. They say she sacrificed her child to the forest to be raised as its own protector. They say her one true love was a soldier, who no matter how he tried could not wash the blood from his hands enough. They say she betrayed him to a cruel man, who lived for the hunt, if it had no means of fighting back against him. She betrayed this hunter too, luring him into the forest and striking him down with lightning on the night of their engagement. She trapped her old lover inside a tree, and for her crimes, she was herself trapped in the river for a hundred years, until all who remembered her were dead and gone.

This is all true, for a certain degree of the word ‘true’.

What is also true is that Meredith Mansfield was born the eldest and only child of Sir Henry and Lady Eglantine Mansfield, on the twelfth day of May 1898, at Collingwood Hall in the small village of Knight’s Crossing. She was given every toy and trinket she wished for, was dressed in the best clothes, but her father spent much of his time overseeing his factory in the nearby town of Hallowford, and her mother entertaining guests for high tea. Sometimes the young Meredith would be trotted out at these gatherings to charm her mother’s friends, who cooed over her rosy cheeks and wavy russet hair, and told Eglantine what a beautiful, charming daughter she had.

From this, Meredith learned how best to get attention from those who would be her peers: that she must be pretty and sweet enough to hold their favour, but wilful and capricious enough that they would seek hers in turn. And only to hint at her innermost thoughts, never to say them aloud. As a rule, however, her mother’s friends bored Meredith, and her favourite pastime was to escape into the woods bordering her home to worry her nannies. Meredith loved solitude, but she also loved to be the centre of attention.

Subsequently, when the Marsdens were moved into the gamekeeper’s cottage at the edge of the woods nearer the village when Meredith was eight, and Jonathan Marsden, being a ten-year-old boy, paid her very little attention at all, Meredith was perplexed. Meredith demanded to know more about this boy, and why he had come to live so close to her – was he to be her friend? Were they to be married? Where was his mother? But her father laughed and shooed her from the room.

Meredith found out the truth from hiding in the servants’ stairwell – the Marsdens came from London, where they had lived in a large townhouse; in fact, Mrs Marsden had been one of the ladies in her mother’s extensive circle of friends. The operative word there being ‘had’, because two months ago, Petronella Marsden had been discovered to have been ‘in correspondence’ with an elixir salesman she met at the World’s Fair in Paris some years ago, and had then promptly ran off with said salesman, leaving a note on the drawing-room table for when her husband Ernest got back from his club. This had then raised all sorts of questions about the Marsden family for their neighbours to pore over, such as the nature of Pet Marsden’s character for her to do such an immoral thing. How much time did Ernest Marsden spend at work in the bank, and how much time did he spend at the gentlemen’s club? Was he a brute on the rare occasions when he was at home, or was he just surly and uncommunicative? Was young Johnny even…his?

These rumours, combined with Ernest’s already snappish demeanour, led to him being politely called into the office of Mr Claverly and let go from what he had thought a safe and senior position at Claverly and Sons Bank. The Marsdens were wealthy, but not wealthy enough to keep their expensive home in London staffed and send Johnny to his boarding-school. And because Sir Henry Mansfield loved the feeling he got from whatever occasional acts of charity he performed, he had arranged a deal with his old friend – that the two remaining Marsdens would move into the old gamekeeper’s cottage near Collingwood Forest, that Ernest Marsden would serve as gamekeeper and groundsman to the Mansfields, and in return, Johnny’s education would be paid for in full. A truly generous offer. Meredith, being eight, understood very little of this, and grew tired of the mystery of Johnny Marsden, as she grew tired of so much. If he did not want to take the trouble of getting to know her, that was clearly his loss as far as she was concerned.

Soon, they were both at separate boarding-schools, and only saw each other briefly during the holidays, when Johnny would briefly glimpse the rustling cherry-pink silk of Meredith’s dress as she ran through the woods, her eyes closed and her arms outstretched in the closest thing to prayer she really practiced. He thought nothing of it and turned back to the task his father had given him for the day.

By the time the Great War was declared, Meredith Mansfield was sixteen and at finishing-school, learning to become a creature of glass and rosewater and candlelight. While she graduated and made her society debut in a dress of the palest rose-pink and cream, Second Lieutenant John Marsden was praying for a mercifully quick death for himself and his friends, and receiving instead a long scar from his jaw to his cheek, forever marking and tainting him long after the war had finished. Meredith longed to talk to someone about the war, longed to tell them how she seemed to feel every shudder in the soil, every torn tree, but no-one would listen to her about such things. She had grown as beautiful as a wild rose, with soft brown waves of hair, clear grey eyes, and a wry red smile, and that was all they saw – Meredith the debutante, Meredith the heartbreaker, the daughter, the vapid, vivacious young woman who, just occasionally, on some balcony late at night, would hint just slightly at there being more to her than parties and dancing. And then she would draw up the shutters again, and freeze the courtship, and the young men who had previously called her bewitching declared that no, she was careless and cold, and that they had never been fooled by her charm for one minute.

And yet it was Meredith Mansfield that Johnny Marsden fell in love with in the summer of 1919, like he would never love anyone else.

He hadn’t intended to return to Knight’s Crossing after being relieved. London held opportunities to forget what he had become, and besides, he’d spent the better part of his childhood there. It could have been home to him, had he not been himself home to an army of ghosts. As it was, he was evicted from every room he kept because his nightmares kept the other tenants awake, and he finally came back to the cottage at the end of Collingwood Forest at the end of May. He did not say a word to his father upon opening the door. The look of contempt said it all.

Meredith spent the day of Johnny’s arrival in the woods, trying not to feel sick with worry. At the age of 21, and her parents’ only heir, her free summers would be ending very soon. They had plans for her to marry a man named Cyril Wilberforce, heir to a mining company in the Transvaal, fond of hunting and little else – and he had an odious pencil-thin moustache on his face. He would be spending the summer at Collingwood Hall, and Meredith was to be her usual charming self to a man with all the natural charm of a bottle of strychnine. To make matters worse, an elderly villager had been found stabbed outside the Green Man, and the atmosphere was running as hot and bitter as the weather.

Was it any wonder, then, that the two took to meeting in an old hut in the middle of the forest for a few hours which nobody but they could lay claim to? In spite of an initial decision to make it purely a physical affair, nothing more, nothing less, the two still quarrelled, then talked, then laughed, then found the world around them changing, until one night, a storm raged outside, and instead of making their usual departure, they stayed, unmoving in each other’s arms until the storm had passed.

And then, they began to meet up in the daytime, outside the hut, just to spend time with one another, just to look, and listen, and kiss. Johnny found his nightmares subsiding, and became less snappish; Meredith started to talk to him about what was on her mind, and how Cyril had cornered her earlier that morning just to talk at her about hunting. They found some semblance of normalcy within each other.

But Meredith started to worry; she wasn’t bleeding, and despite her anxieties subsiding, she still felt nauseous. Meredith knew enough to know that in all likelihood she was carrying Johnny’s baby, that neither she nor Johnny would be fit parents to the child, and that if her parents discovered the truth, she would be forced to marry Cyril. And so, she took a spare dress and petticoat and towels, and walked into the forest one afternoon, and begged. She begged the forest to take this poor child from her, that she was too selfish to be its’ mother, but not selfish enough to try and stay that way, that she could feel the forest’s longing for someone to truly love it in the way that she and Johnny did, she could feel it like static in her bones, and she could give them that.

The blood trickled down deep below the earth and under the roots of the tree, where the child would come to term. Only when she had changed her clothes did she allow herself to collapse and cry silently, until Johnny found her and held her, not knowing but understanding nonetheless.

And this was how Cyril Wilberforce found them, tangled up together, his intended and some pathetic washed-out casualty of a useless war. He said nothing, but he knew what had to be done. Time for Jonathan Marsden to join his friends, he thought.

A few days later, Maud Hammond, a maid at Collingwood Hall, was found shot in the stomach with Johnny Marsden’s service pistol lying by her body, and Johnny, so used to conflict, so aware of where staying and fighting the good fight had gotten him, ran and hid. His guilt looked certain, and Cyril Wilberforce smiled to himself, even as Meredith approached him with a small knife and told him she knew, that she would tell the Inspector exactly where Johnny had been that night no matter what it cost her. He smiled as he caught her arm and twisted it until the blade dropped to the floor, and as he looked into her tear-filled eyes and told her that if she did, he would hunt her lover as if he were a particularly troublesome fox. He was being generous to the poor deluded girl, really, he was – how many young ladies got to choose how their lovers died? Quick or painful, which would it be?

Meredith Mansfield told the Inspector that she could not provide an alibi for Jonathan Marsden, and that the rumours that they had been meeting up in secret were false. The people of Knight’s Crossing hated her for it, calling her a vile woman behind a sweet face. Maud Hammond’s young sweetheart Anthony, who Meredith had noticed looking at her on occasion, came up to her in the street and told her she disgusted him, and that Johnny Marsden was a far better man than she deserved. And Meredith drew herself up once again, and walked away under her parasol, and privately thought he was right.

She was a wicked woman, and she and Cyril Wilberforce were meant for each other. But if she was to be bad, she would take that darkness, make it hers, and do with it what she could. And dear God, twenty-one years of repressed sadness made for a lot of darkness.

Meredith was back to her usual charming self in the days leading up to Collingwood Hall’s annual ball. She had a dress made of dusty-rose satin and glass beads, she flitted about the house again, and though the rest of the world despised her, her parents and Cyril were thrilled. Their beautiful girl was freed from the tainted clutches of the Marsden family – and Ernest Marsden had been let go from his position and the cottage. They could finally escape that embarrassing chapter in their lives.

She continued this for the ball, smiling coquettishly at the hard, cold stares of the people around her until they turned away in rage. When Cyril asked her to be his wife, she smiled beatifically, told him yes, and kissed him on the lips. Everyone in the room, bar Sir and Lady Mansfield and Cyril Wilberforce, felt sick to their stomach. In the minutes following the engagement, while everyone else could no longer bear to look at her, Meredith suddenly became coy, and whispered seductively into Cyril’s ear to meet her in the clearing by the river, under the oak tree in Collingwood Forest. Before he had time to affectionately call her a little minx, she had slipped away.

Cyril Wilberforce went crashing through the forest for his little doe, his sweet march hare, his sly fox. And when he found her again, the moon shining against her dress, he exclaimed how ravishing she was. Meredith smiled, and asked him if he remembered the lovely offer he had made her; the tantalising offer to choose how her lover died. He said he did.

The realisation hit him a second before the lightning did.

What had once been Cyril Wilberforce took a step, raised an arm toward Meredith in accusation, before falling to the floor, seemingly dead. Back in the stables at Collingwood Hall, his horse whinnied in fright.

Meredith released the breath she had been holding and watched as Johnny Marsden staggered out from behind the oak tree. He looked exhausted, and broken, and as lovely as Meredith had ever seen him. She kissed him gently before he could ask her what she had done, and as he began to smile for the first time in days, she backed him up against the oak tree until he sank into it, and she was kissing the bark itself. A kindness, she told him, to heal and to grow as he had always wanted, until he would no longer carry death around him like a chain around his leg. She recalled the last conversation they had had, in which she had imagined them married and celebrating Christmas together.

And then she went to the side of the river, and hoped it would be enough for her to run free again, yet stay as she was. To stay by her lover’s side in the cool dark woods, but to have people flock to her and praise her. She leaned back and let herself fall, and disappeared into the waters the minute she touched them. Until people could love her again, not because of what she was to them, but because she was real, flawed, a human.

Every year, on the anniversary of that night, a strange breeze blows through that oak tree alone as the water from the river becomes wild and splashes over it.

And every Christmas, guests at the Collingwood Hotel occasionally catch a glimpse of a beautiful young woman in pink running through the halls and laughing.

Just a little glimpse of something that is almost the real thing.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this piece based on a Tumblr post I wrote about Kate Bush reminding me of a turn-of-the-century young lady who had murdered her evil fiance to be with her lover forever, and now I'm trying to turn it into a proper story. The story of most of the characters in this piece is nowhere near over, because in Knight's Crossing, people just can't seem to stay dead... I want to make sure that the next piece in this series is considerably more diverse than it is currently. Feedback welcome!


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